James Whyle from Johannesburg, RSA (Officially the longest distance question yet received in the Commander's short blogging history... so congrats James!), writes: I'm based in Johannesburg, RSA, and would value any advice on how to get noticed as a "great writer" if one is not based in LA.
First, the good news... assuming you've written a great screenplay, getting noticed is the easiest part of becoming a successful screenwriter.
Now the bad news... the scale I'm working off of here (easiest to hardest) exists in a very rarefied world... that is to say that there is literally nothing easy about becoming a successful screenwriter. I once read an article in the Washington Post which suggested that more people have been made millionaires by the California Lottery than by screenwriting. I have no way of verifying that statistic, but having worked in Hollywood for as long as I have, I'm telling you that I believe it.
OK, so with THAT depressing reality out of the way, let's talk about how you, as a writer with a fantastic screenplay on your hands, get noticed in Hollywood... for the time being I'm going to focus on ACTUAL Hollywood, California... I know there are plenty of vibrant film communities around the world, but I'm not the guy to tell you how to break into the film business in Australia, Zimbabwe, or Prague, I'm sorry to say. I'm gonna stick to what I know.
So... as far as Hollywood goes, let's start with the Internet. The web is a tremendous resource for the budding writer. It's given millions of would-be writers access to affordable screenwriting software and great advice sites (like this one) where information that used to only be accessible by getting into one of the top two or three film schools, is now available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Of course the downside is that an awful lot of people are taking advantage of that fact and most of them are not visibly talented. As a result, the glut of mediocre and just flat-out bad scripts out there is clogging the system to a degree I've never seen before. This is going to severely impact your ability to get read. One agent confided in me recently that he gets up to ten unsolicited e-mail requests asking him to read a script every single day! Think about the logistics of that. A fast reader can finish a screenplay in about 45 minutes. But at ten submissions a day, no one could possibly keep up with all that reading and still be able to do their job. The consequence is that most agents just delete e-mail queries without reading them.
Managers are a different story, however. Most writers find managers to be much more receptive to the idea of reading an unsolicited screenplay. Part of that stems from the fact that managers are not supposed to engage in the process of soliciting jobs for writers and directors (which is what agents spend most of their workday doing). Many managers do it anyway, even though they aren't supposed to, but the majority will wisely leave that part of the job to the agents they work with.... which frees them up to read more scripts. Most of the managers I know made their bones and built their client lists by wading through piles of screenplays nobody else wanted to read, and picking out the diamonds in the rough. In fact, most good managers think of the business of weeding out the crap and finding the gems part of the service they provide to the industry, and often look at it as the very thing that sets them apart from agents.
The Internet also gives you unprecedented access to Hollywood's players and gives you the platform from which to "get noticed." The web is filled with resources designed to help you figure out who those management companies are as well as information on the best way to get in touch with them. Everything you need to know, along with insight from those who have tried and failed before you, is yours for the taking on the WWW.
When it comes to looking for the right manager to approach with your script, look for newer, smaller companies who represent writers you admire or whose work you think yours resembles (this point could spawn an entire blogpost on its own about researching the people you're asking to read your scripts... example: if you think your work most resembles Robert Rodat's, then for crissakes don't send your script to Judd Apatow's agent!). A lot of the well-established management companies may be too big to read truly unknown writers at this point (although you never really know) but there are plenty of younger/newer companies that specifically cater to that emerging market. The web will tell you who they are.
Another often overlooked path to getting noticed is the screenplay competition. Everyone in Hollywood, be they producers, agents, or managers, up to and including your humble host, reads the ten Nicholl Fellowship Award finalists every year... which means you don't even have to win to get read! And every year new competitions come and go. Again, go online... figure out what those competitions are, and enter every goddamned one of them. I guarantee that even if you win a screenwriting contest called "the contest whose winners never, EVER, get read"... your script will get read by somebody.
Relatedly, I'm a fan of blogging to get noticed. I know more than a few writers who have been discovered through blogging. It's a long-shot, granted, but this whole damned business is basically a crap shoot, and every now and then it does happen, so why not give yourself every opportunity to get read. Start a blog, update it regularly, and try to write about something interesting... no one wants to read endless posts about how great your script is, and oh woe-is-me why won't somebody READ IT!?!?
One final note on the business of writing. If you want to make it in Hollywood as a successful screenwriter, sooner or later you're going to have to move here. Best to wrap your head around that fact right now. Some hugely successful writers are able to maintain careers from New York or Boston, but the reality is, if you want to work in Hollywood, you have to BE in Hollywood. There are lots of reasons why, but the most important one is that this business is based on relationships, and you simply cannot maintain a relationship with Hollywood from 12,000 miles away. (for more on this issue, see Shears' related comments in this post.)
Quick story: good friend of mine has been kicking around town for ten years... working temp jobs, writing specs, and meeting with anyone who will take a meeting. It's been a long hard road, and he's really talented, but he's only now starting to see some results, a decade later! And it's not because he sold a spec, which most wannabe writers assume is the end-all be-all of a career-starter... no, instead, he worked a relationship he developed with an up-and-coming associate TV producer, and worked it hard. Eventually he was able to convince that producer to hire him to write a freelance episode for a TV show on the air, just to see what he could do... and the producer became so impressed with his work-ethic and his skill level, that when this producer created a new show and sold it to the networks, he brought my friend on as a staff writer.
Now THAT'S what I call getting noticed...
...and unfortunately, it's very hard to do that kind of thing from Johannesburg...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment